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Barbara Walters can sniff a great interview out of anyone

Interviewing one of the greatest interviewers of all time starts with watching her in action. Barbara Walters is sitting on a couch at The View next to Atticus Shaffer, the 16-year-old actor who plays Brick

And now, all of that is coming to a close as Walters' daily TV appearances will end May 16, her final day on The View (although that day's episode will actually be taped a day earlier). A two-hour special is scheduled that night on ABC (9 ET/PT).

But today, on the set, she is the queen, a sort of national treasure to be respected, admired and helped as she gingerly makes her way down from the steps of the stage.

In her dressing room after the show, when asked to do a short video, Walters isn't shy. She's fine with having to take off her belt and unbutton the top of her dress to put on the microphone. "You know who told me I had a good side and a bad side?" she says.

It's more fun to bask in those good old TV news days than to talk about the "R" word.

"I don't use it. Retire sounds like you're walking into the sunset. Mostly I want to have no schedule. I want to visit a country and see something other than the studio. When you talk about retiring, it's usually something people don't want to do or are forced to do."

For Walters, it's also about exiting a world that has changed drastically over the decades. After all, when she started, there was no Internet, no cellphones. She even remembers having to use those early bonnet-style hairdryers — and that's not easy when you're chasing after heads of state and doing remote stand-ups in foreign countries.

Don Hewitt, who created 60 Minutes, once told her she had lived through the golden age of TV news. And she agrees.

"To be able to travel around the world, to be able to interview the president of Egypt and the prime minister of Israel, to do the kinds of interviews I've done — that does not exist anymore," she says. "I look back, and I have some of the pictures on my wall, and I think, 'Wow, did I do that?'"